Russian President Vladimir Putin does not love his country and its people because he is sending Russian youth to die in his wars of aggression, President Volodymyr Zelensky said in an interview with American podcaster Lex Fridman published on January 5.
“He doesn’t love his people. He only loves those around him,” Zelensky said in response to Fridman’s suggestion that Putin is a “serious person who loves his country.”
“What is his country?” He considered Ukraine his country,” the president responded during the three-hour interview, noting that Putin had also previously launched a destructive war against Chechnya, now a constituent republic of the Russian Federation.
Putin rose to power during the Second Chechen War in 1999-2000, in which Russia subjugated the region by force and seized its capital, Grozny, after a devastating siege.
“Who are the Chechens? Another people: Another faith… Another language. A million people eliminated…. How did he kill them – with love? Zelensky asked rhetorically.
The Ukrainian head of state also stressed that Russia’s all-out war against Ukraine had left 780,000 soldiers dead or injured, adding that Putin “calls them all Russians, even those who don’t know how to speak.” Russian, on its Russian territory. , everything they enslaved.
“He (Putin) sends 18-year-old boys (to die in war)… It’s not that fascists have come to his country, and he must defend it. He came to us and he is sending them,” Zelensky continued, giving other examples of Moscow’s wars and military interventions in Syria, Chechnya, Georgia and Africa.
Although Russia’s exact losses during the full-scale invasion are difficult to establish with certainty, The Economist writes that they already exceed Moscow’s battlefield losses in all its post-1945 wars combined.
Ukraine launches new offensive in Russia’s Kursk Oblast, mixed reports on results emerge
Ukrainian troops attacked Russian forces from several directions in the Kursk oblast, Andrii Kovalenko, head of the Ukrainian center for combating disinformation, said on January 5. News from Russian pro-war Telegram channels echoed this statement, claiming that a new offensive by kyiv was underway. .
